I don’t think of your hands anymore, but my dreams are plagued with the feeling of being held.

I tried doing something new and wrote a somewhat structured poem – a sestina (a simplified version). So that’s why some lines are much longer than others. Oops. I’ll explain what a sestina is at the end of this post.

I spent yesterday morning thinking of what to write.I typed out a text and imagined you reading it on your phone,And I realized it would pass through your mind as yet another minor inconvenience eating up your time.You’d send a quick reply with a furrow of annoyance on your forehead (saying, I have things to do more important than this). No, I can’t have you read it. I need you to listenAnd watch my lips form the words my hands cannot bear to writeBecause my eyes cannot stand seeing them illuminated back at me on my phone.Your ears will have to suffer the weight of the truth and listenAs my mind learns that it can both speed up and slow down time.I need you to give me something more valuable than those gifts that sit untouched in my mother’s jewelry box under my bed. Like say, your time. If only you took the time to really see and to really listenTo the things I did not show or say, I might’ve sat down in my kitchen to writeYou a love letter inspired by our favorite foods, rather than have been frozen in a catatonic state, my hand clutching my phone.I slowly lost track of timeUntil my roommate came home and pulled me out of my stupor with fleeting concern, “What’s so important that you spent all morning staring at your phone?”

I didn’t know how to tell her that you took over my mind again when I heard your laughter on the bus last week and so here I am, sitting and thinking of what to writeOr if i should even write anything or if I should just forget about what used to be or if I should beg you to listen.By 2 p.m. yesterday my phone was at two percent and just before it died, I knew what to write:“Meet me by our oak tree at 5 tomorrow. Please,” so that you can finally listen as I tell you that I don’t love you anymore, but I still miss you after all this time.

Mkay so a sestina is a poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet. All stanzas have the same six words at the end of the lines, but in a different order in each stanza. The triplet also contains the six words, but two per line. This is the pattern (each letter represents a different end word):

ABCDEF

FAEBDC

CFDABE

ECBFAD

DEACFB

BDFECA

ACE or ECA (You can mix the order of the B, D, and F as long as you put one of them on each line so you have 2 of your 6 words on each line.)

My simplified version used 4 words (write, phone, time, and listen) instead of 6. This was super bumpin to write, so you should try it too!